Unfortunately this pollution comes mostly from heating and trust me - I wish it was coal these people were burning.
To put this into perspective: last year I was celebrating new year's eve in eastern Poland and met a shopkeeper who was complaining that he can't take wood from a local national reserve.
So yeah - sorry about that. A large part of our society is focused mostly on their own convenience.
It’s still nowhere as clean as even natural gas, but even without switching fuel sources you can do a lot to make wood burn cleaner.
I wish they were. Wood was probably just a part of that gentleman's own "energy mix", consisting mostly of culm(coal dust), trash, coal and wood.
Recently coal dust for heating purposes was outlawed, along with stoves not meeting a certain standard of emissions, but that didn't stop retailers from offering products which were not up to those standards.
Anyway the main issue still appears to be awareness, as many people who could easily afford to use gas for heating still choose to pollute, because it's cheap and convenient.
Now of course not all of that is from burning coal for electricity (Poland had a lot of manufacturing and heavy industry), but if you were to decarbonise in general it would make a big difference to us :-)
From next year, all new homes here are required to generate most of their electricity from renewable sources, so we should start to see a big uptake in solar. I think this comes from EU regulations to decarbonise housing, so maybe there is something similar in Poland?